James Agate Quotes

James Agate presents sharp theater criticism that cuts into career, truth and art.

24 quotes

1. Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If he can't pretend that, he will look through the object, or round it, or above it or below it, or in any direction except into it. If, however, you force him to look into it, he will at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.

2. Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

3. A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it; an amateur is one who can't when he does feel like it.

4. Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything.

5. The maddest phenomenon in this wholly mad world - that the filming or wirelessing of an event, whether it is the Grand National or an attack in force on the Maginot Line, is held to be of more importance than the event itself.

6. I don't know very much but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it:My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

7. The producer. This is a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.

8. The worst of failure in this kind is that it spoils the market for more competent performers.

9. I like listening to it just as I like looking at a fuchsia drenched with rain.

10. My mind is not a bed to be made and remade.

11. New Years Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

12. New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

13. My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

14. A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is a man who can't do his job when he does feel like it.

15. New Year's resolution: To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.

16. This was an actress who, for twenty years, had the world at her feet. She kicked it away, and the ball rolled out of her reach.

17. The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.

18. In her early days she had that beatific expression characteristic of Victorian prettiness - like a sheep painted by Raphael.

19. Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

20. The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn't sex but something else.

21. I... wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain.

22. Don't pity me now, don't pity me never; I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.

23. To force myself to earn more money, I determined to spend more.

24. All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose.